Fans of DragonFly BSD will be getting their Christmas present late this year, and plans for 1.5 have been announced. MP safe networking code, the long awaited cache coherency management system, and a port of Sun's ZFS. Read here for more. Update: Refresh, empty cache, whatever, and check the shiny new beastie icon! And there was much rejoicing. Can we now please discuss DragonFly BSD?

HFS+ is simply an extension of the old HFS code. It's the same basic filesystem that's been in Macs forever, it's just that the block address sizes have been extended to cover larger filesystems. In a very real way, HFS+ is to HFS as FAT32 is to FAT16.

It'd be more accurate to say that HFS+ is to HFS as NTFS is to HPFS (which is 16-bit, and 100% MS....why IBM went to JFS in later versions of OS/2). NTFS is 32-bit, includes journalling, is currently being developed and improved, etc. etc.

Still, having dealt with macs running HFS+ since 8.1 was brand new (afaik, one of those is still in use at my former job, doing ProTools work every day), I can say that it is a) fast, and b) very stable.

To put it another way, there's good reason why Apple did work to make HFS+ Unix-friendly, rather than try and improve UFS for use with OSX. NeXT/Openstep used standard FFS.

No, its more the need to for file forks support and the need for case preserving but case insensitive support - that and the fact that HFS+ isn't that broken, as much as the nay sayers would love to make out.

Sure, its the not the prettiest file system out there, but at the same time, is it worth replacing it with something else? I mean, if they're going for something that has 'teh cool' factor, they may wish to talk to SUN and see if they can port ZFS over to Mac OS X.

As for DragonFly, its looking like its really ontrack, and the gamble to try a new route to MP capabilities has really paid off in the end rather than the approach which the FreeBSD team took - thats not to say that Dragonfly got everything right, but at the same time, when you compare the resources that both teams have got, they've come a long way, very fast.